If Your Brain is Different, Your Path to Healing Will Be Different

“If you work hard enough to heal your trauma, you will eventually function like an ordinary neurotypical.”

That’s the lie many “trauma-informed” experts are peddling.

Trauma-informed mental health care that seeks to suppress innate neurological differences is violence with a pretty name. Trauma-informed care that does not account for variation in individual nervous system responses can be a traumatic experience. (If this has happened to you, you aren’t alone.)

Without a neurodiversity lens, trauma healing presents a one-path-fits-all myth which causes low self-esteem when that path fails.

If we try to integrate the sensation memories and trauma energy that is stored in our tissues without recognizing that there are a wide variety of ways in which people sense and process that information, we can easily overwhelm ourselves by repeatedly attempting methods & modalities that don’t actually work for us.

Differences in severity of trauma responses are due to neurodivergence.

Differences in treatment and therapy effectiveness are due to neurodivergence.

Having different autonomic nervous system responses doesn’t mean we are dysfunctional or faulty.

Neurological differences and disabilities are real. We do not need to be cured, but we may require a lot of support.

There is no one path to healing from trauma. If your brain is different, your path will probably be different from the norm. That’s ok.

For most of us, our brain will always be different no matter how much personal or spiritual growth work we do.

The goal of trauma therapy should never be to make us function like like neurotypicals, but that’s the kind of “help” many of us have experienced.

This is one reason why you can’t be truly trauma-informed without a neurodiversity lens.

PICTURED: AN ND PERSON WITH A BUBBLE OF TRAUMA AROUND THEM, A BUBBLE OF INVALIDATION AROUND THAT, AND A BUBBLE OF SHAME AROUND ALL OF IT.

Here is another reason you can’t be truly trauma-informed without a neurodiveristy lens… Much of our trauma happened because of our neuro-differences.

There is of course the sensory trauma, first, the overwhelm of being in a world that is too loud and bright and smelly since birth, but that's not what I want to focus on today.

I want to focus on the interpersonal trauma and relational that happened because of our differences, or more accurately, because of people's reactions to our neurological differences.

There is a common feedback loop here that professionals and those seeking to heal need to know about.

Our natural differences make us targets for abuse in a culture that does not tolerate any deviation from a standard norm.

The rejection, punishment, isolation, and abuse we experienced does not exist independently of our neurological differences.

In many cases, traumatic events followed our authentic expression of neurodivergent emotions, behaviors, or traits.

So we learned to suppress ourselves and hide behind a mask. For our protection. Because the world wasn't safe for our True Self.

We also blamed ourselves, because we didn't understand that it was the people around us who had a problem. They couldn't accept our differences.

This feedback loop leaves layers of trauma energy in the body.

If we don't identify neurodivergence first before attempting to integrate the layers of trauma that stacked on top, then understanding what happened to us can feel impossible.

We may need to know why we were bullied in order to unravel the somatic memory of grade school trauma.

We need to know that our innate differences were never the problem if we are to understand the gaslighting effect of being forced to act neurotypical.

We need to understand our neurological identity so that we can name the frequent micro-aggressions and more blatant ableism that make us doubt ourselves and feel unsafe in social situations.

For many of us, knowing that we process input differently from others is the missing piece of the puzzle.

We are different, so our trauma is different.

We need a neurodiversity lens so that our trauma work actually works FOR us instead of against us.

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*Pandemic Update (02/24/21): If you're nuerodivergent (ND), your response to the active trauma of the pandemic may be different from what you expect or from what professionals expect. That's normal for our neurology, and nothing to be ashamed of. Hyper-sensitivity and hypo-sensitivity will be common for us as our exhaustion with this state of things continues.

Give yourself as much grace as possible in the next few months. It's ok to slow down or pause your deep childhood trauma work because your system is already quite taxed. If you need to go back to the stabilization phase of healing for a while, that's ok! It's doesn't mean you're going backwards. Healing is a spiral! We often need to go back to stabilizing and finding a sense of safety or refuge in the present moment to be able to integrate any more trauma energy.

To read more about phases of trauma recovery, click here —> https://www.dis-sos.com/trauma-therapy-stabilization/